On Inner Peace

Pietas Quest Question: What is the path to true inner peace through moral development?

Direct Answer
Before pietas, morality is often reduced to utilitarian rules to avoid trouble, leaving a sense of emptiness and inner dissonance. After pietas, we seek harmony with transcendent moral realities through the cultivation of duty and conscience, leading to the inner peace we all hunger for.

I wish peace for myself as well as for others, and, in the search for it, must demand that self-evident truth be not ignored. When I, in company with my conscience, go hence, or when I with untutored but fully awakened moral instincts stand now face to face with the insufferably resplendent moral law, I desire harmonization with my environment. - Joseph Cook

One of the biggest obstacles to my moral development when I was younger was the (false) sense that the whole purpose of being a “good boy” was to get through life as inconspicuously and unobtrusively as possible. Not lying, cheating, or stealing was beneficial to society and would keep me out of trouble. This is true as far as it goes.

But when I encounter perspectives such as Cook’s, the utilitarian approach to morality can’t help but feel cheap unless it is grounded in something more foundational, transcendent, and real. Our deepest intuitions confirm the reason that Cook gives for this.

We are moral beings who swim in a sea of moral realities. In our best moments, we apprehend the dissonance between what we are and what we’re capable of being, what we ought to become.

We are then faced with two choices: to silence that inner voice and give precedence to our baser appetites, or to seek harmony with those moral realities through the cultivation of pietas and the dictates of conscience.

Only one of these paths leads to the inner peace we all hunger for.